Jean-Luc Dehaene, giant of Belgian politics, dies

The death has been announced of Jean-Luc Dehaene, a prime minister of Belgium in the 1990s and a member of the European Parliament for ten years. Dehaene, who had been suffering from pancreatic cancer, died in France today (15 May) after a fall.

In June 1994, the Flemish Christian Democrat almost became president of the European Commission in succession to Jacques Delors, but his candidacy was vetoed by the United Kingdom, which deemed him too federalist. Instead Jacques Santer, the prime minister of Luxembourg, was appointed.

Dehaene was prime minister of Belgium in 1992-99, succeeding Wilfred Martens as the head of a coalition led by the centre-right. Belgium was in the midst of substantial reforms – social, constitutional and fiscal.

The Dehaene government improved the public finances, whilst preserving Belgium’s social pact, which made him a plausible candidate to succeed Jacques Delors as Commission president in 1994. Eleven out of twelve member states backed Dehaene, but John Major, the British prime minister, who was struggling to contain Euroscepticism in his own Conservative party, vetoed him.

Dehaene was re-elected in 1995 as prime minister of Belgium, and continued to push through difficult budgetary reforms that prepared the country for eurozone membership, which weakened the government’s popularity. Dehaene’s power-base was Vilvoorde, a town on the northern edge of Brussels. In 1997 Renault announced the closure of its assembly plant at Vilvoorde , with the lost of 3,500 jobs – it was a symptom of the economic transformation that was convulsing Europe at that time. The escape of Marc Dutroux, who was awaiting trial for child kidnapping and murder, combined with a scandal about dioxin contamination of food, condemned the CVP to defeat in the 1999 elections that brought Guy Verhofstadt to power at the head of a liberal-led government.

In 2002 Dehaene was made a member of the praesidium – the inner core – in the convention on the future of Europe, that drafted the EU’s constitutional treaty. In 2004 he joined the European Parliament as a member of the EPP group and was re-elected in 2009. He drafted a report on the future financing of the EU, but was more prominent in Belgian corporate life than in the Parliament. He was a director of InBev, the brewing giant created from the merger of InterBrew and AmBev. He was later chairman of Dexia, the Franco-Belgian bank that became a victim of the Eurozone’s banking crisis and was re-born as Belfius. He was mayor of Vilvoorde in 2000-07. Early in 2014 Dehaene was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he was not seeking re-election as an MEP because of his health problems.

Elio Di Rupo, Belgiums prime minister said that Dehaene had “done great service to Belgium, both economically and institutionally”.

Verhofstadt, who is now president of the liberal ALDE group in the European Parliament said: “This is a sad day for Belgium and Europe.”

Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament, described Dehaene as “a convinced enthusiast for Europe and Belgium”.

José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, said Dehaene had been a unifier: “His role as a mediator shone through in all of his work.”